One of my favorite You Tube channels is “Living Traditions Homestead”, a middle-aged couple with two kids who gave up the corporate grind to homestead in rural Missouri. They work way harder than they did in the corporate world, but they love what they do and are able to make a living at it (and the income from the YT channel is gravy).
One thing that is a constant is that their plans are constantly changing, as they figure out what works or doesn’t work for them, as life and world circumstance change.
This is very definitely changing. Lots of stuff, such as farm machinery is getting too complicated for a Jack of all trades to fix. And other things are simply more efficient to have specialists do the work.
Or, as in the case of John Deere, the manufacturer makes the buyer sign a EULA, (Extended Use License Agreement) which REQUIRES the farmer to hire a certified mechanic to work on the machine.
There are a number of agricultural derivatives used to manage risk, e.g. futures, options, marketing contracts, that require some minimum financial savvy.
Ditto, I come from a farming background and I think it captures the frustrations and joys of farming better than many po-faced documentaries can ever do.
I’ve heard much the same from real farmers as well, i.e. that it is a fair (if simplified) representation of the pressures they are under.
Also, for all his knowing, cultivated buffoonish persona, it is glaringly obvious that he cares about what he is doing and he is completely self-aware regarding how much of an idiot he is when it comes to farming.
I live in rural Ohio, surrounded by fields. Mainly corn and soybean. Before moving here in 2000, I naively thought farming would be a simple and very part-time job: plant the seeds in the spring, harvest the crops in the fall/winter, and then take them to the grain elevator. How wrong I was. I’ve gotten to know one of the big-time farmers down the road from me, and discovered they are always working; the equipment is very maintenance-intensive. And they’re out in the fields many times during the year to apply fertilizer, insecticide, etc. During harvest season I will hear the engine of the combine working the adjacent field when I go to bed, and I will hear it when I get up eight hours later. Yep, they were out there all night. Lather, rinse, repeat. I now have much more appreciation and respect for the trade.
Having good business skills is especially important for those raising specialty or cutting-edge crops. You wonder how many aspiring growers read an article about demand for exotic vegetables, hemp etc. and plunged into an operation without carefully exploring the intricacies of costs, supply, demand and so on.
Good marketing abilities are also valuable.*
*Clint Eastwood’s character in The Mule wouldn’t have had to resort to drug smuggling if he’d paid more attention to having a viable Internet presence for his daylily operation.
My wife and I finished Clarkson’s Farm last night, which we watched on recommendation from this thread. We both have farming of one kind or another in our background, and that definitely increased our appreciation of the show. While some aspects of his struggles were hard to believe (in the final episode after a year of farming he struggles to back up a single-hitch wagon?) in general the problems he faced with the weather, supplies, mounting costs, water, regulations, etc were all very much true to life.
On the other hand, while he had his share of problems, at the end of the year he had successfully produced a television show and still had his pre-existing wealth. His farm store benefited from his existing celebrity. He could afford to mess around and be clueless about things. In this way it’s not a fair representation of how farming works for those trying to make a living at it, as is true for all reality TV.
Yeah, I always have felt that Clarkson’s persona is at the very least a wink & nod kind of thing, or maybe even intentionally tongue in cheek, in that May and Hammond took great delight in deflating him every chance they got.
I had a chance to talk to a farmer/distillery owner for a few hours last year. He started a farm to grow grains from the past, that evolved to growing his own rye, barley, triticale (a rye hybrid) and a couple types of wheat, items that can be used to make whiskey. He and a couple buddies decided to join the small distillery boom about 15 years ago using the grain he grew. When he started his wife did all the books, he now has a team of 7 full time employees to handle all the paperwork. He now supplies grains to a couple larger distillers and his distillery. His distillery is still a hobby (i.e. is losing money) but his grain sales have boomed in recent years.
I have not watched the show, so I’m not sure what you mean by a single-hitch wagon.
Does the wagon have one or two axles? If it has one axle, backing it up should be relatively simple (like a boat trailer, for instance). If it has two axles, and the front axle pivots when turning (like a child’s red wagon), then backing it up is far from trivial.
That’s what I meant. I believe he was dealing with single axle, but I could be mistaken. Still, after a year of farming he should have been more than capable of backing up a two-axle wagon. It’s not that hard.
I’ve backed a single axle trailer up more than a quarter mile on a narrow dirt road across a field (fence on one side, irrigation pipe on the other) without an issue. The road ahead was blocked and so I was going to have to back it up either going in or coming back out.
I can’t back up a two axle trailer for more than a few feet.
Have you ever tried it? It’s damn near impossible without backing up a couple of feet, pulling forward a bit, backing up again, pulling forward, rinse and repeat.
Yes, I am definitely speaking from experience. It’s tricky, for sure.
But I just went back and checked the episode. While the trailer in question does have two axles, they are both fixed at the back. So backing up this trailer should have been no harder than an ordinary boat trailer. Again, not trivial if you’ve never done it before, but how do you farm for a full year and not master that basic skill?
Well, for one thing, I don’t think Jeremy Clarkson was a farm boy. But I haven’t seen this show, nor have I seen The Grand Tour but I saw plenty of episodes of Top Gear when he was still on it, and he seemed to deliberately play up his foolishness.
Ahhh. Tandem axles. Pretty much the same as one axle.
We built a horse trailer with three axles together in a similar arrangement. It is easy to back up.
The difficulty is when an axle can turn left or right.
We have an old low-boy trailer that was originally built to haul heavy machinery behind a truck. Instead of pulling it with a truck, it has a front that is similar to the back part of an old truck with the fifth wheel and with a trailer hitch in front so that we can pull it behind a tractor. So it has one axle at the back and another at the front and the front turns from side to side. While it can carry large pieces of equipment very nicely, it is nearly impossible to back up more than a few feet.
